Steve Closes in on Six Figure Blogging Mark

Congratulations to Steve Pavlina who posted a few days back that in less than a year he’s grown his blog’s income from less than $10 per month to last month hitting $4700 for the month. That’s some pretty impressive growth for 10 months!

‘My income goal for the year was to reach $3000/month (from this site that is — this isn’t my primary source of income). In January of this year I made less than $10 from this site, so that’s a nice increase. Aside from adding new content, every month I dive through the metrics and do more experimenting and optimizing. This year my plan was to put down a solid foundation for future growth without concerning myself too much with making an income from it — the second year will be a lot more exciting. Even if I did nothing but continue to write new content and stopped working on optimization altogether, I’d be very surprised if this site generated less than $100,000 next year, so I expect I’ll soon be joining the ranks of six-figure bloggers.’

Steve goes on to talk about his plans ahead – particularly to take on an assistant to help out, something I’ve pondered on and off this year also. Another thing to add to my list of ‘things to think through in 2006!

Steve has a great site with heaps of good information, I’m not surprises he’s doing well. Congrats Steve.

My own blogs have approx doubled their Adsense income each of the last couple of months (albeit from small numbers – $2, $5, $11) which is all very exciting especially if it keeps doing that, except… what do I do next?! How do I guarantee it keeps growing? I feel like at the moment it is more luck. :D

I’d love to see an article Darren on what to do to keep a blog growing. I know there’s the basics – i.e. keep writing! – but logic tells me this should plateau (or am I thinking in terms of traditional business?)

Con Grats on the income, but wow. Some of those pages have almost the entire page filled with ads until you scroll down. I don’t think I could ever read a site like that. Kind of hard not to click an ad… I don’t know. I guess that is the way to make money, and a big reason why my sites don’t.

Impressive! I dont know if someone asked this before. Really wondering since my blog is non-techie and I see most of the successful blogs are about tech stuff and money making on net etc, are there any other blog themes out there that are successful? Forgive my ignorance.

i thought google’s policy is that one are not allow to reveal their income? anyway, i agree with jamsi, i hate blogs that have too many ads, its a pain in the leg. and i couldn’t agree more with kamemada, most of the blogs that makes money are those that says how to make money. I got a few blog, mostly art and design blogs and you don’t want to know how much i make a day – not in dollars but in cents. Was thinking of removing the ads.

It would be great if Darren would point out a few non-tech, how to make money site that is actually making money out of it. Lets say an anti-smoking site or charity site.

According to Steve numbers, apparenty if people really want to read some content they won’t go away because of ads. In my opinion he deserves money from ads and I don’t mind searching articles in the ads…it’s worth it :D

Financial terms are harder topic, because one has to actually know something about the industry. There are not freely available product reviews to link into. As a result, one has to write articles on how to use financial products in various situations.

If you are starting out with blogging, just choose a consumer electronics brand or product category and start copy pasting. Keep it focused and don’t sprawl into something else before you are seeing results.

Calvin – I did an Adsense Preview Tool view of your blog and I can tell you the problem. You should be serving ads (if you had any) for AutoCAD, design software, digital photography, etc. based on your topics. But all Adsense preview is showing is the miniscule cents per click ads for blog related stuff. You’d probably triple your income or better if you completely expunged the word “blog” from your blog. Don’t use the word blog; don’t put the word blog in menus; refer to your site as a “site” or even “page” not a blog; if you link to something with blog in the name leave the word blog out; if you absolutely have to talk about blogging, talk about b!0gging. I have several non-tech, non-financial sites that average more than pennies a day. None to retire off of, but breaking into the multiple dollar per day per blog mark with my political sites is increasingly common and with only moderate traffic.

I’m in agreement that the ads are in- your- face and invasive from a new visitor’s standpoint.
Then I go on to read all about what the guy is doing for more money and how he has no time to read all emails he receives.
That should keep visitors sticky, huh?
I dunno—just not my cup of tea I guess.

Maybe his ads are a little unsubtle – but he has a very popular blog and the quality of his content is pretty decent in my experience. Interesting to see how many problogger readers think the ads are over the top though.

Thats why I will never be anything close to a problogger. I just want to make back my costs and have fun doing it. A site covered in ads like that will never be on my reading list. I most just take in the general web knowledge here. I wouldn’t mind making more money, but I could never get my self to do it that way I don’t think.